


Unfeeling

by HyperKey (Sylverstia), Sylverstia



Series: Chronological Order [19]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Upgraded Connor | RK900 Has a Different Name, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-07 00:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18227201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylverstia/pseuds/HyperKey, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylverstia/pseuds/Sylverstia
Summary: Sometimes everything gets too much, and things happen that couldn't be foreseen.





	Unfeeling

**Author's Note:**

> Spooked around my mind for a while.  
> Not quite the way i wanted it to be but, heres to more!
> 
> I live on comments! Feed me!
> 
> also I have a twitter! Follow me~  
> https://twitter.com/Hyper_Key

It started slow. So slow that he didn’t really notice it. Life progressed as usual. They continued to do the things they usually did.

Gavin continued being the way he was. Snapping, yelling. The occasional joke on his expense.

Cory didn’t remember when that started to hurt.

He was trying hard to gain the human’s approval, yet no matter what he did, Gavin was always complaining. Nothing was ever good enough. Always comparisons to humans, to more experienced members of the force.

The android knew well where he was lacking, but without guidance on these issues he couldn’t progress.

And Gavin was no help.

It was slow. Sneaking. Similar to spring that had snuck up to them. Now it was almost April. Where did the time go?

He wanted to go back. Forget emotions, maybe never even meeting the human.

He felt sensations in his body he never thought possible. His diagnostics would have alerted him to any sort of error, but they never picked up anything.

Another quip of Gavin when their shift ended. He had never been stabbed before, but he thought the sensation in his chest felt like being stabbed. Was this what Connor had meant when he said that emotions tended to hurt?

Was this pain?

He wanted it to stop.

“Get the fuck going, or I leave without you.” Gavin snarled and grabbed his keys. He left without looking back.

Cory wondered if he should just stay at the precinct tonight. Was that right? Technically he was his own person, could go wherever he wanted to. And yet he still followed the human. He had no one else. Where was he supposed to go?

Connor had offered to take him in for a day or two if he needed a break, but did he really want to do that?

Was he okay with imposing his own issues onto Hank and Connor? Perhaps even the dog?

When he entered Gavin’s apartment and the human went straight to the bathroom, dropping his clothes as he went, Cory wondered what he was doing. And why?

Surely there was something better out there. Someone who valued his presence. Someone who wanted him around.

Gavin barely spoke to him when it wasn’t necessary. He had been assigned to Gavin, yes. But did that go beyond work? Had that been a requirement?

He spent too long wondering, jumped when Gavin suddenly poked him in the side.

“If you gonna shut down do that somewhere else.” Another accusation. Another stab in his chest.

This time his thirium pump stumbled. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever.

Gavin didn’t seem to notice. He went to the kitchen, brewed himself coffee and petted his cat.

A stray, Cory had learned a while ago. A stray cat that one day just ended up with him.

There was a kind heart buried underneath the hard shell, but Cory doubted Gavin would ever reveal it to anyone, especially not an android.

“So, what’s with the case? You’re thinking about that, right?”

Truth was, Cory hadn’t thought about the case in hours. He could barely recollect what they had gathered. Of course that was all stored and he would find it if he looked long enough, but at that moment, he could not recall where he had stored it.

Slowly he made his way to the kitchen, settled down on a chair, as Gavin would expect of him.

The case. What had it been about?

He struggled to remember.

“Theories on who robbed the woman?”

Right. The robbery. The homicide of a woman who was then robbed and left in the streets. Cory struggled to reply, struggled to gather enough processing power to form words.

He quickly realized that he couldn’t. his mouth opened, but no words formed. Everything suddenly blank.

In simple terms, it was terrifying. He wasn’t supposed to fail, he wasn’t supposed to do this. All of this was unlike anything he was supposed to do. He wasn’t meant to feel, to experience emotion to wonder about things. He was supposed to function.

A jolt ran through him when Gavin snapped his fingers in front of his face. “The fuck you on about huh? If you don’t wanna talk fine. Don’t waste my time.”

The detective stood, ripped open the fridge and threw various items on the counter. Left over pizza and a can of diet coke.

Not a healthy meal by any account, but Cory couldn’t tell him that. His voice box hadn’t shut down, but it wasn’t functioning. He couldn’t reboot it either, there was no error to be detected.

“Stop staring at me for fucks sake, if you hate my eating habit that much just fucking leave!”

Cory was standing before he realized it. The chair fell down, his secondary cooling system suddenly suspended. Overheating imminent.

What was going on?

 _He couldn’t breathe_.

He hands curled into fists, into the ham of his shirt, eyes wide, no doubt, LED red. Of course.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t alert the human that something was wrong. Would he need a technician?

Probably. Gavin had left his phone in his car. Cory couldn’t alert him through that either. The distance was too far and the man wouldn’t read it anyway until he realized that it wasn’t in the apartment.

Gavin scoffed, food forgotten when he turned around and walked closer to the android. “Think we established early enough that you can’t intimidate me.” His tone was mocking, a sly smirk on his face.

A dirty grin and Hank would call it. Would Hank know what was happening?

His stress levels spiked. While he didn’t need to worry about self destructing, overheating was a very real threat.

Cory was frozen to the spot. His body wouldn’t move in any sort of way. He couldn’t even blink.

And then Gavin’s expression suddenly fell and all color left his face. Cory swayed, gyroscope finally succumbing to the stress, but two strong arm grabbed him and pushed him onto a chair. It was a rather rough move, almost violent, but effective.

All of Gavin’s anger and frustration was gone now. He genuinely looked concerned. “Fuck did I break you?”

Cory couldn’t even shake his head. Was it Gavin’s fault? He didn’t know.

He didn’t know anything of what was going on.

Everything felt far away, distant and yet threatening all the same.

“Talk to me, come on-“

He couldn’t. as much as he wanted to, there was no words to be formed. Mind still blank, unable to find the correct query, the right command. There was not way to respond to the man.

Unless…

Cory managed to raised his hands a fraction, found Gavin’s sleeve, gripped into it. He had not strength to pull the human close. Yet, the desire to feel these strong arms around him was enormous. He wanted Gavin to hold him.

For whatever irrational reason there was.

The detective was at a loss, but when Cory dipped forward, simply because the gyroscope stopped giving him valuable data, Gavin’s arms came around him.

It was an action borne out of necessity, but it felt safe.

“Come on, say something. This isn’t funny.”

It really wasn’t. Still there was nothing he could do. Words slowly came back to him, ideas, adjectives. Things he could work with. But they still wouldn’t translate into speech.

He needed to communicate with the man. He had to. Gavin would push him away again if he didn’t _man up_ and told him what was going on. He had to force his programming to work against whatever was holding it back.

Slowly he brought his hands back to Gavin’s shirt, weakly fisted the fabric for a moment, before he managed to pull up the needed file. ASL. He had knowledge of it.

Did Gavin?

He figured everyone knew the alphabet. But no matter how often he spelled _help_ , Gavin didn’t pick up on it.

Frustration wasn’t new to him. Frustration had come early. An emotion, a feel that he was familiar with. It made tears prickle at the corner of his eyes. Why couldn’t he just talk to Gavin? It was so easy to respond usually.

Why couldn’t he just speak?

A sound ripped through the silence that made both of them jump. “What the fuck-“ Gavin started, quieted down quickly when he realized the sound had come from the android.

“Are you-“ The human moved away, confusing melting into concern. “Shit. Shit! What’s going on?”

Cory wanted to scream at him, the desire so strong, but all that left him was an angry growl. He did regain some control over his range of motion, but all that did was make him fall forward with a weak attempt at grabbing Gavin’s shirt again.

Gavin shoved him back into the chair and grabbed his pockets in search for his phone, only to find that he had forgotten it in the car.

Cory had the error log ready, if only the phone was in range.

Then he caught sight of the dining table next to him. The tipped over tin of Emma’s colored pencils. Pieces of colored card board next to it.

He lunged at it so fat, Gavin cursed under his breath.

‘CANNOT SPEAK.’ He scribbled so fast, even his usually perfect hand writing came out messy. Almost human looking.

Gavin sank into another chair when he read the message.

“…Jesus Christ you scared the shit out of me!”

Cory was just as terrified, but that wasn’t important to communicate. He needed to write more vital information.

‘ERROR UNKNOWN. REQUIRE ASSISTANCE.’

It was all he could do at this point. The error wasn’t going to correct itself, it seemed. And he had no clue what to do about it.

But Gavin finally seeming concerned brought something else with it. A strange warmth, something that made the lance of hurt melt away.

“Yeah noticed you running kinda hot… need a cold shower?”

It was a good idea, for what it was worth. As long as Gavin didn’t have his phone on him, and Cory no access to the internet due to the scrambled, whatever was messing up his system.  He didn’t want Gavin to leave.

The nod came easy. The walk to the bathroom did not. He was swaying too much, vision cutting in and out. This was not supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to fail like this.

Once in the shower, Cory just leaned against the tiles and let himself slip to the ground. He couldn’t trust his legs to keep him upright, and Gavin’s concerned glance was somewhat comforting.

“You not gonna take the clothes off?”

Cory shook his head before he had fully registered the question. No. Gavin had seen him undressed before and that had been an unpleasant experience.

“Hey I’m not gonna drench you when you’re completely dressed, you have like no clothes here.”

He didn’t have any real clothes in general.

Reluctantly he let Gavin help him get rid of the clothes and douse him in lukewarm water. He gradually lowered the temperature, almost as if he knew that was the better solution than to shock his system.

“So what was that? Why can’t you talk?”

“The system was overwhelmed-“ Cory was as surprised as Gavin when his voice sounded through the bathroom.

“Not anymore, I take it.” Gavin shrugged and crouched down. “…you really scared me.”

“That was unintended.”

“No shit.”

Cory avoided his partners eyes. “You were treating this unit rather carelessly. Perhaps your behavior caused the error.”

Gavin lifted an eyebrow. He had rolled up his sleeves, but they were drenched anyway, as were his pants. “What you got all weird because I was poking fun?”

“It… _hurt._ ” Gavin almost missed the silent reply.

“Hold up, I thought you guys don’t feel pain-“

“…Emotional pain we feel.”

Gavin rubbed a hand over his faced and hung his head with a deep exasperated sigh. “Fuck… this is messed up.

It really was.

Cory hoped it wouldn’t happen again.


End file.
